


Anchor

by Shulik



Category: Common Law
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 08:39:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shulik/pseuds/Shulik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He places his keys on Wes’s specially designed hooks, nailed at exactly the right distance between the front door and the hallway closet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anchor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/gifts).



Travis hums under his breath, headphones in his ears and head bobbing slightly as he walks through the door. The key, the one that Wes had made after the first month, after they had managed not to kill each other and not let each other get killed by others- it shines conspicuous and new with the rest of his stuff, the rest of his keys hanging off his favourite keychain, a gaudy cactus dressed in a Mexican flag bikini and waving a bottle of tequila. Travis loves that keychain for two reasons: the constipated look on Wes’s face whenever he pulls it out, a mixture of disbelief that the keychain exists and bafflement at his own unfortunate and deeply impressive, especially considering his commitment issues post-Alex, choice to give his very shiny and very obviously _brand spanking new_ house key to someone who considers that little cactus a good choice. The other reason why Travis loves that keychain, enough for even Wes to appreciate his bond with it is Maria Consuela Fernandes. One of his foster family’s abuelas, a small round woman with a head of white hair and an embarrassing love for the motherland and telenovelas. Travis still goes combing through fleamarkets whenever he has time, a large backpack to fill up with presents for the kids and his eye out for any embarrassing Mexican-themed paraphernalia. On Saturday mornings, he spends an hour on the phone with his abuela, discussing the latest developments in the Concita-Miguel-Jose triangle, both of them getting pretty heated over who's going end up with Miguel. Abuela's rooting for Jose.

He places his keys on Wes’s specially designed hooks, nailed at exactly the right distance between the front door and the hallway closet, just right for the reach of an arm and not far enough to hurt yourself when moving. Abuela’s cactus smacks against Wes’s keys, bound by a shiny silver ring and nothing else. Travis probably goes to a place to get his keys shined. Travis wouldn't put it past him. 

The hallway closet, as usual, looks like something going through a deeply disturbing and yet at the same time, fascinating identity crisis. The panelling that Travis had finally snapped and installed _right_ in the middle, which Wes had double checked, separates his own stuff on the right from Wes’s on the left. Too many arguments about Travis’s sneakers dumped haphazardly in the corner of the closet, his jackets that Travis never zips up after he hangs them- which apparently leads to optimum space sharing and lets the clothes ‘retain their shape’ and the smartest decision that Travis could have made in the midst of one of Wes’s lectures on space sensitivity and Travis’s laziness, was to divide the closet in two. It looks ridiculous to outsiders and Alex had laughed the first time she’d seen it, before eyeing Travis with a new kind of respect, but the thing is- it works. 

The kitchen smells like cooking and Travis takes out one of his earphones, yup there it is he can hear the faint sound of the radio, probably some kind of long-winded program on energy resources or political ramifications of the North Korean arms race, whatever it is that’s probably got Wes up in arms today, and Travis is probably going to have to listen to it later, pretend that he’s interested in what Wes is saying and isn’t just watching the long lines of Wes’s neck when he talks, the smooth grace in his long fingers, gestures becoming wilder as he gets more worked up until eventually, Travis will have no choice but to stand up, slowly sliding his half finished plate of food to the side and walk to where Wes has turned his back to him, is reaching for something on a top shelf, is still ranting about Kim Jong Il’s latest idiocy and his shirt, that shirt that Wes had bought in four different colours because he liked the way it sat in his shoulders, it’s ridden up enough to show a sliver of skin, golden and vulnerable, _soft_ above the harsh black of Wes’s dry-clean only slacks. Travis will slide his fingers up that shirt, stopping Wes’s rant in its tracks, slide his fingers around Wes’s body, feeling the hummingbird quick pulse of Wes’s heart, still, after all this time ratcheting up insanely whenever Travis has his hands on him. Travis will slide his fingers up, circling the pads of his fingertips around Wes’s nipples, surprisingly, _shockingly_ sensitive and _flick_ , listening for the telltale hitch in Wes’s breathing, that small gulp and the way that his Adam’s apple jerks until Wes’s is burning, on fire and Travis will have no choice but to step back and let Wes slam back into him, whirl around, greedy and possessive, grey eyes molten as he will capture Travis’s lips. 

The way that Wes still kisses him even when he’s angry, how he still cradles Travis’s head in his hands, runs his thumbs over Travis’s cheekbones, like he’s still trying to commit him to memory, even after all these years, trap that kiss between the two of them, the meeting of their lips, slick wet and yearning and still just enough bite to the sweetness to make Travis’s cock swell whenever they’re stuck in a stupidly long meeting and Wes licks his lips before ripping into someone, vicious and so damn _smart_. 

Travis used to make little notes at the end of their dates, not that either one of them called them actual _dates_ , just times when it’d be the two of them, for once not destroying each other and trying to one-up one another, pizza and beer at Travis’s when they’d discovered Wes’s surprising love of hockey and his embarrassing mancrush on Brodeur. Or the times when Wes would drag Travis back to his place, muttering things about expanding cultural horizons and heathens that couldn’t be trusted to evolve on their own. Unavoidably, there’d be classical music involved those times and Travis would write down the composer’s names as well, write it all into a black moleskine that he’d picked up in between tailing a suspect, started filling up after the first time that Wes had launched off about some Roman guy, like quoting philosophy was going to win him points with the Captain, like there was still a big part of Wes that thought like a lawyer. 

Didn’t want to think like a cop. 

Travis would come home, crack open a beer and read through his notes, go online and research, reading up on things that Wes found interesting because even then, even before they’d admitted that they were pretty much _it_ for each other and Wes had capitulated, had given in, broken down the borders and walls and made a key for Travis, asked him to move in, even before all that- Travis had known on some level. Had felt it, that unfamiliar and terrifying itch beneath his skin, the urge to know _everything_ about Wes, besides the things that made him tick, the things that he’d already known as his partner- he wanted to know the stupid things too. What Wes read, listened to, the news that Wes obsessed about and his views on everything. Travis wanted to know it all, a small flame that slowly kept getting bigger, growing and growing, a terrifying need to see all of Wes’s dark corners and make his home in them. 

Travis had never considered himself stupid, he’s always been a smart kid, a good detective and he’s always been aware that he can run circles around Wes when it comes to social interactions. But the thing is, as ridiculous as it is to admit that Travis had thought this at the time, Wes is more educated than him. He’s got the law degree and Travis is pretty sure that the time when Wes had yelled something about a Master’s in clinical pathology, ‘all the better to diagnose Travis with’, he hadn’t been joking. 

Somehow, slowly the moleskine had stopped leaving the drawer the more time that Travis would actually spend at Wes’s new place, watching him putter around his garden in his ridiculous gloves, squinting crazily into his new azaleas and demanding whether Travis thought they were wilting. 

“Hey,” Wes’s voice breaks his reverie, stops his thinking and Travis steps into the kitchen, dumps his gym bag by the door and grins softly at Wes. He’s got the glasses on, the ones it had taken him two years to admit to needing, this the third pair that they’d had to buy after Wes’s glasses kept getting smashed under their bodies as Travis would slam him into the first hard surface. Apparently glasses on Wes were a thing, Travis thought that his twenty-six year old self, the kid that had first made partners with Wes and had hated him on sight would have been horrified. 

“Hey,” Travis drops a slight kiss on Wes’s lips, doesn’t lean into his space and quickly glances at the paperwork, smirking as he sees the newly closed case file in front of him. Wes’d lost the previous night’s bonus round, loser had to take care of the paperwork and Travis has never been more glad that besides being slightly and hilariously obsessed with her Mexican heritage- abuela had also taught him how to cheat mercilessly and take his opponents for all their worth. 

“I’m going to jump in the shower,” Travis says and rolls his eyes at the obvious relief on Wes’s face, like the gym’s showers are inadequate and it’s only their own one, the specially installed extra-large cabin that Wes had terrified the builders on with the surround showerheads and pulsing modes that can work up to Wes’s very exact specifications. 

“How was your workout?”

They’d learned the hard way that Wes needs to work out in the mornings, preferably the same time each day and with the same routine while Travis works out whenever he can. Whenever he wants to, go running and burn off excess energy, play basketball with some of the other guys from the precinct, all of whom needle Travis mercilessly about Wes never coming out to play with them and Travis, each time, wants to laugh hysterically at the thought of Wes ever going out to play sweaty, smelly one-on-one with guys he won’t even shake hands with if he doesn’t have his sanitizer at the ready. 

“Same old,” Travis shrugs, “Jonas says hi, by the way. He also said something about you not returning his emails, but I told him I have no idea about that.” Travis frowns. One of the hardest things that they still deal with are the guys who think that just because they live together and work together and are both dudes, it doesn’t matter which one of them they talk to. People are apparently ridiculous and don’t fully understand that Travis and Wes are two separate people with completely separate interests but who happen to be in both a professional and personal relationship with one another. 

Wes nods- “that’s fine”, but his eyes are fully trained on the stubble on Travis’s cheeks, the result of not shaving for a couple of days, sleeping on the couch at the precinct, waiting for the lab results while Wes had been tied up with IA, testifying on a rookie’s stupid mistake. 

“I’m going, I’m going-“ Travis lifts his hands up, laughing as Wes breaks into another one of his relieved smiles before shooing him away. 

“Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes,” Wes points a pen at him, and Travis knows that it’s blue ink, gel with a thin tip- “I’m not going to reheat it for you if you’re late.” 

“Bitch, bitch, bitch”- Travis smirks good naturedly before yelping as a pen hits his forehead. Wes looks smug and sexy and Travis laughs, laughs at the fact that they surprise each other, even when it seems like surprises are the last thing either one of them will like and darts forward, catches Wes’s laughing face in his hands and licks a long stripe up his neck, leaving him sputtering. 

He’s halfway up the stairs, laughing still when he chances a look back at the table where Wes is still half buried beneath the paperwork, the look on his face is a mixture of turnedon and grossed out but he’s still grinning and the sanitizer hasn’t been moved from where it’s sitting behind him, on the kitchen counter, right beside Travis’s dirty Elmo mug.


End file.
